- ING CISO says data sharing is key to financial cybersecurity
October 30, 2023
Compliance has been the traditional focus of IT departments in financial institutions, but as cyber threats continue to evolve, the financial industry needs to look to each other to help protect the wider ecosystem. Finextra spoke with Beate Zwijnenberg, chief information security officer at ING, about some of the challenges the bank is facing across ...
- Octo Tempest crosses boundaries to facilitate extortion, encryption, and destruction
October 25, 2023
Microsoft has been tracking activity related to the financially motivated threat actor Octo Tempest, whose evolving campaigns represent a growing concern for organizations across multiple industries. Octo Tempest leverages broad social engineering campaigns to compromise organizations across the globe with the goal of financial extortion. With their extensive range of tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), ...
- Stealer for PIX payment system, new Lumar stealer and Rhysida ransomware
October 24, 2023
In Brazil the PIX payment system is becoming more and more popular. Unsurprisingly, cybercriminals are jumping on the bandwagon, trying to abuse the system for their profit. A good example of this is GoPIX, a malware campaign that has been active since December 2022. The attack cycle begins when a potential victim searches for “WhatsApp web”. ...
- From Copacabana to Barcelona: The Cross-Continental Threat of Brazilian Banking Malware
October 23, 2023
Proofpoint researchers have long tracked clusters of malicious activity using banking malware to target users and organizations in Brazil and surrounding countries. Recently, researchers observed multiple threat clusters targeting Spain from threat actors and malware that have traditionally targeted Portuguese and Spanish speakers in Brazil, Mexico, and other parts of the Americas. While the targeting ...
- Top crypto firms named in $1bn fraud lawsuit
October 19, 2023
US prosecutors have accused three high-profile cryptocurrency firms of defrauding investors of more than $1bn. New York Attorney General Letitia James said Gemini, a crypto exchange, had lied to customers about the risks of an investment account it offered, which paid high interest rates on crypto. Genesis, a crypto lender, and its parent company Digital Currency ...
- Equifax fined £11 million by financial watchdog over 2017 cyber attack
October 13, 2023
The UK’s financial watchdog has fined Equifax £11 million for its role in one of the largest cyber attacks, which affected more than 13 million British consumers in 2017. The credit rating giant failed to keep its customers safe during an “entirely preventable” cybersecurity breach, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said. Read more… Source: Yahoo Newss
- India’s Bank of Baroda expose worsens: Agents steal money from accounts
October 12, 2023
India’s Bank of Baroda made it simple and easy for its agents to steal money from the accounts of its customers. And some of them did steal 2.2 million rupees ($27,000) from 362 customers, internal audit reports and records of the bank have revealed. The audits come after an expose by The Reporters’ Collective (TRC) and ...
- Qakbot-affiliated actors distribute Ransom Knight malware despite infrastructure takedown
October 5, 2023
In a late August 2023 operation involving the FBI and many international partners, law enforcement agencies seized the infrastructure and cryptocurrency assets used by the Qakbot malware, dealing considerable damage to the group’s operations. Many people in the security industry wondered whether this would mean that the Qakbot affiliates were gone forever or just temporarily ...
- A cryptor, a stealer and a banking trojan
September 28, 2023
Last month Kaspersky researchers covered a wide range of cybercrime topics. For example, Kaspersky published a private report on a new malware found on underground forums that they call ASMCrypt (related to the DoubleFinger loader). But there’s more going on in the cybercrime landscape, so the researchers also published reports on new versions of the Lumma ...
- UK: Reported cyber security breaches increase threefold for financial services firms
September 25, 2023
Cyber security breaches for UK financial services firms have increased threefold from the years of 2021-2022 and 2022-2023, with the highest – reportedly – being in the pensions sector. New research by the international law firm RPC shows that the amount of reports of cyber security breaches to the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) has increased from ...
- Latest evolution of ‘pig butchering’ scam lures victim into fake mining scheme
September 18, 2023
Crypto fraud has become the dominant form of Internet-based confidence schemes over the past three years, as demonstrated by the sha zhu pan (“pig butchering”) scams Sophos researchers recently investigated. But one variant has been growing at a particularly rapid pace: fake “liquidity mining.” Sophos X-Ops has also seen growth in crypto phishing sites that connect ...
- Kuwait’s finance ministry says cyberattack hit one of its systems
September 18, 2023
Kuwait’s finance ministry said on Monday that one of its systems had suffered a cyberattack in the early morning but that the ministry continued to work normally. The ministry said in a statement that protection systems and procedures had been activated and “the level of the hacking attempt is being assessed.” Read more… Source: Alarabiya News
- Analyzing Cuba ransomware
September 11, 2023
The group’s offensives first got on Kaspersky researchers radar in late 2020. Back then, the cybercriminals had not yet adopted the moniker “Cuba”; they were known as “Tropical Scorpius”. Cuba mostly targets organizations in the United States, Canada and Europe. The gang has scored a series of resonant attacks on oil companies, financial services, government ...
- Thousands of dollars stolen from Texas ATMs using Raspberry Pi
September 7, 2023
A Texas court has heard how last month a gang of men used a Raspberry Pi device to steal thousands of dollars from ATMs. According to local media reports, three men were arrested in Lubbock, Texas, after attempting to steal “large sums of US currency” from ATMs. The men – 38-year-old Abel Valdes, 41-year-old Yordanesz Sanchez, ...
- German Banking Regulator BaFin’s Website Hit by Cyber Attack
September 4, 2023
German banking regulator BaFin said its website has only been partially accessible since Friday after a so-called distributed denial of service attack. BaFin took security and defensive measures after the attack which also restrict access to the website, according to a spokeswoman. All of BaFin’s other systems are working without disruption, she said. Read more… Source: Yahoo! News
- CISA and FBI Publish Joint Advisory on QakBot Infrastructure
August 30, 2023
Today, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA), Identification and Disruption of QakBot Infrastructure, to help organizations detect and protect against newly identified QakBot-related activity and malware. QakBot—also known as Qbot, Quackbot, Pinkslipbot, and TA570—is responsible for thousands of malware infections globally. Originally used ...
- Impact of SEC’s New Cybersecurity Policies
August 18, 2023
The rapid advancement of technology has led to an increasing number of cybersecurity incidents that pose significant risks to organizations, their stakeholders, and the general public. Recognizing the importance of transparent and timely reporting of such incidents, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced on July 26, 2023, that it has adopted final rules ...
- Bangladesh Bank warns banks and financial institutions against cyber attacks
August 12, 2023
The Bangladesh Bank has issued out a comprehensive 11-point instruction in a situational alert, urging all banks and financial institutions to bolster their cyber defences. This move comes on the heels of a recent cyber threat targeting the country’s cyber sphere, with potential implications for critical state information infrastructure (CII), including banking, healthcare, and government operations. Read ...
- JanelaRAT: Repurposed BX Rat Variant Targeting LATAM FinTech
August 10, 2023
In June of 2023, researchers at Zscaler ThreatLabz discovered a threat actor targeting FinTech users in the LATAM region. JanelaRAT involves several tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) such as DLL side-loading, dynamic C2 infrastructure, and a multi-stage attack. The final malware involved in this campaign is a heavily modified variant of BX RAT. Because of this, ...
- Uncovering an Iranian mobile malware campaign
July 27, 2023
During a recent proactive hunt for malicious mobile malware, Sophos X-Ops researchers from SophosLabs discovered a group of four credential-harvesting apps targeting customers of several Iranian banks. Most of the apps are signed using the same – possibly stolen – certificate, and share various classes and strings. The apps target the following banks: Bank Mellat Bank Saderat Resalat ...

